The community is awesome

One of the greatest successes of WordPress was its ability to build a strong community around it.

Almost any question was already asked and answered in some corner of the web (probably hosted in some WordPress site) and there is awesome places where you can find them, such as stack overflow and Quora.

You can build your MVP without writing a line of code

This of course will depend on the level of complexity of your product, but it is entirely possible to build a MVP without having to write a single line of code.

The WordPress plugin directory has a uncountable number of WordPress plug-ins covering almost any possible thinkable feature. If you need something more specific, you can always search in the various plugins and themes marketplaces, such as CodeCanyon and ThemeForest and spending only a few bucks you can get your idea of the paper.

People have done it already, and they’ve succeeded.

I totally understand how this can sound a little bit weird, to use a CMS such as WordPress as a development framework, but you would not be the first one to try it, and we have some awesome use-cases to prove how possible and useful it can be to do that.

Hello Bar

One of the firsts to take proud of using this approach was the awesome people behind Hello Bar – a simple SaaS that allowed users to add a Call to Action bar to the top of their pages, increasing conversion rates. We could list their motives here but we prefer to let them do the convincing:

Happy Tables and Restaurant Engine

These two startups with similar propositions also took their first MVP out to the market using WordPress as a framework of development. It’s very easy to see why WP is a perfect fit for startups like these:

1. They need to support multiple accounts managing and customizing their own “website” – something that can be easily achieved using a WordPress Multi-site installation;

2. The service they provide is based on different types of user inputs (like menu options and so on). That can be achieved with little effort using WordPress native custom post type functionality.

Note: The founder of Happy Tables gave an interest interview to the Product People Podcast detailing the whole process of choosing and developing the product using WordPress as a base. You can listen to that here and here.

Conclusion

It’s important to note that, while WordPress may note be a good fit to all possible scenarios, it’s a good alternative to rapidly test a product to validate an idea and gather feedback from the final users, saving tons of money and time when we put it side-by-side with starting a project from scratch.

Do you also think that WordPress is a viable alternative to a MVP? Your project or the project of someone you know use WordPress as a framework? Let us know in the comments bellow and don´t forget to subscribe to our newsletter!